Also, last week we announced a joint venture partnership with Paicheng International Technology Transfer (PITT), headquartered in Beijing and with offices throughout China. The venture is established as a global intellectual property vehicle to invest in intellectual property for monetization and divestiture through licensing, sales and net-new start-ups.

Our company, Dominion Harbor, through its newly established subsidiary, DHG China Ventures, LLC will contribute portions of its vast portfolio of thousands of patent assets, coupled with our decades plus in IP transactional experience. China is eager and willing to become a mature, global participant and we’ll bring our experiences and best practices.

We have spent more than a year researching and in dialog with more than a dozen Asian entities. What we found was a partner that both shared our long term vision for IP commercialization and had the credentials to facilitate them in China and throughout Asia. It is far too an important market to rush to a partnership.

From David Pridham, our CEO: “An international footprint has long been our strategy since our founding in 2013 and now with the recent acquisition of the iconic Kodak portfolio and with a growing roster of global clients, the timing for this JV is perfect”, says David Pridham, co-founder and CEO of Dominion Harbor. “Along with PITT’s contact capital, experience financing and launching innovative companies, this partnership can now help hundreds or thousands of companies worldwide compete better on the global stage.”

Beyond assembling world-class patent assets for commercialization, the Joint Venture will explore ways to bring the most advanced patent and intellectual property best practices from around the world to a burgeoning Chinese Intellectual Property business community.

China is quickly proving an excellent IP marketplace. They have established an excellent IP-focused court system in three cities: Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou with a speedy docket and low costs for litigation. The central government, in its latest 5-year plan, has again squarely put innovation, invention and IP at the forefront. In 2016, The government’s tolerance for its national treasure companies not conforming to global IP standards are met with much scrutiny and reprimand. Also, China was the largest issuer of patents and registered applications – another push toward invention and innovation.

We’ve seen a bit of a gold-rush mentality of new investment vehicles established as well as incubators/accelerators to promote these efforts and push these patents into creating innovative companies. I guess, one could hope that the new U.S. administration and our Congress could take the lead from the Chinese and see that inventors and innovators simply need a fair playing field and a little encouragement; they will do the rest in a free market environment. Let’s put done the legislative pen and embrace inventors.

We will take a measured approach to discern the “signal to noise” as the IP opportunist in country and international player move to grab share in this explosive growth. The winners in this space will take the time to build a foundation for long term growth. We plan to avoid the early chaos the U.S. experienced post the dot-com bubble in the early 2000s.

China is earnest in becoming a legitimate, global player in intellectual property and we will do all that we can to insure that we provide best practices and guide them away from momentum killing mistakes us in the West have suffered over the past decade.

We’ll have a new website and much more on the announcement front in the coming weeks and months. Please stay close to the Blog to receive the latest.